What profit margin do you expect for water damage services, for mold remediation, for reconstruction, or roofing services? You should have a profit margin benchmark for each category of revenue that you rigorously work to achieve.

Each source of revenue can be clearly identified and broken out on your Profit and Loss Statements so you can see from which sources your revenues are generated, and how well your business is doing in each one. With established profit benchmarks, you can test your operational efficiency to see how often you reach your goals on each job and what you need to do to improve overall profits for each revenue stream of your business.

There are many internal factors you have control over that affect your ability to sustain higher profit margins. It is important to understand what they are and how to control them. Your estimating practices, wholesale materials sourcing, job costing, labor cost controls and a few other key areas make all the difference in profit generation, or loss. By continuously assessing each one you can make the necessary changes to increase and maintain high levels of profit for each area of work. Increasing operational efficiency by just 5% will increase your bottom line profit by 20 percent. It’s true!

Internal, incremental profit growth is the easiest growth you will ever gain. Keeping more of what you have already earned is simple — and profitable!

Set realistic and attainable goals at the higher end of the profit range, and you should pursue these profit benchmarks on every single job and for every revenue category. High capacity companies built for volume regularly achieve 75 percent profit margins on mitigation services, 65 percent on contents cleaning, 50 percent profit margins on reconstruction services and 40 percent on roofing.

Can you imagine the difference it would make in your company if you could accomplish nothing more than to regularly attain these profit goals with work you already have?

Jack Dennison is the president of J2Development, which specializes in helping restoration companies increase growth and improve profit margins. Dennison is a former restoration company owner. He now helps other business owners grow their businesses. You can visit his website at: www.growmyrestorationbusiness.com.